Labor as Partner in Production

Report Outline
Labor's Demands for Voice in Defense Program
Progress of Cooperation Movement Since 1917
Union-Management Collaboration, 1919–1941

Labor's Demands for Voice in Defense Program

Recent months have brought a growing demand by organized labor for a larger voice in the direction of industrial production for national defense. Labor's hopes for greater participation in the management of productive operations, as expressed by union leaders, spring from a three-fold desire (1) to obtain a larger share of the immediate benefits of industrial expansion, (2) to speed up defense production by bringing about a higher degree of coordination within the industrial structure and by making possible the fullest utilization of labor's technical knowledge of production processes, and (3) to lay the basis for a gradual reconstruction of the American economy to abolish poverty and unemployment and provide a rising standard of living.

In the United States, as in Great Britain, prominent labor spokesmen have taken the position that the war has demonstrated a need for fundamental readjustments in the economic system and that a decisive victory cannot be won by the democracies without far-reaching economic changes. Many labor leaders hold, with Harold J. Laski, British political philosopher, that “the price of this war is the making of a more equal society, and the road to it lies through the ending of those vested interests which subordinate to profit-making the reconstruction that price entails.”

Philip Murray, president of the Congress of Industrial Organizations, and Morris L. Cooke, an industrial engineer, gave joint expression in a recent book to the conviction that present circumstances require the elevation of organized labor to a status equal with that of ownership and management in industry.